skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If my memory serves me well this worked only with the PAL version of the C64. Because the video chip (VIC) was so tightly coupled with the main processor and RAM, the video refresh rate determined clock speed. The PAL C64 was clocked at 0.98 MHz, the NTSC version was 1.25 MHz, so US C64's were faster per se.

If you had a PAL version you could switch between both frequencies with a switch soldered to some place on the board (or maybe it was the user port), but of course you then lost video output as long as the switch was in the NTSC position.

EDIT: Wikipedia says the NTSC version was only 1.023 MHz, so I remembered that number incorrectly. Maybe you were referring to another trick that would give you a 10%-20% speed increase?
@cperciva - you're right, I can't answer those off the top of my head like I could 15 years ago when I studied it.

I don't think that's a problem with the exam system though; I could probably have answered them 12 years ago. It's just related to the field you end up in and how much you need to lean on that knowledge in your day to day job.

As it stands, given a couple of hours of reading, I'd easily be able to refresh my knowledge and answer the questions, primarily because I had a solid formal training in it initially. Ability-wise, the me of my uni days could never do the job I'm doing now - well, not without another 15 years experience :)
From Abstract: "In contrast, no support was found for the selection hypothesis."
No, you're right, it's a specious argument. While digging for data to back it up, I found this interesting quote from Camenzind:

There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not
want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation
with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely
different than it is now. Everybody was stealing
from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics
produced it, and six months, or before a year later,
National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid
any attention to patents. The people at Signetics
told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent,
because what would happen if they tried to enforce
that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come
back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say
“These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re
violating”. It was a house of cards – if you blew
on it, the whole thing collapsed.[1]

That's strong evidence that the lack of patent for the 555 was unrelated to its particular success, so I admit I was wrong about that. But if Camenzind is correct in his history, then it sounds like Silicon Valley had a solution 40 years ago to the patent mess: pretend they don't exist!

[1] http://www.semiconductormuseum.com/Transistors/LectureHall/C...
A very important distinction is that liquid rocket engines should be shut down when problems are detected, and an explosion should not occur.

This has been done many times in history, in Saturn V and Space Shuttle for example.

But in this case, since the engines are so small, it seems the explosion tactic paid off very well.

Hopefully they can test Merlin-1D adequately. If you aim for reusability, your reliability must go up considerably. If you plan to fly something for 100 times, you probably can not tolerate 98% per-flight reliability. A lot depends on assumptions of course.
The quote at the top of this thread specifically argues causation from non-patent to success.

Not patented -> rivals release own versions -> price pushed down -> chip becomes ubiquitous.

It is, of course, entirely possible that, if patented, it would have been licensed at a low enough cost to still have become ubiquitous.
A Big Laser Runs Into Trouble
Also notable is Quantum Link ($9.95/mo) - originally for the C64 and C128 - which later became America Online.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
Why would it be unethical if people voluntarily agree to participate?
As I wrote in my introductory post, I have needed to know most of these things in my day-to-day job. Of course, it depends on what sort of work you're doing.
Early Halloween UFC 153: Horror Story Vs. Demian and Spider Vs. American Psycho
Given the rate at which I'm getting emails, I don't want 100x more results!
if your target market is not hardcore computer geeks that can read your mind, I'd suggest asking a copywriter to help you with the site. I honestly don't understand what is your product about and what a use case is.
SalesGossip Finds A Deal For Itself, Bags £300K Angel Round
A little off topic but this domain hosts a hacker news daily updated archive located here: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

Thanks cperciva for hosting it!
Both of the hosts were engineers, actually.
New Blogpost Terrestial TV
Or, y'know, open source cross-platform implementations of XNA.

https://monogame.codeplex.com/

https://anxframework.codeplex.com/
3D printing spells the end of "Made in China"
Interns are managed differently because they're paid by the hour. Regular employees account for time spent on various projects, but that has nothing to do with your pay and is just a tool for accounting R&D time back to various business units for overall business planning.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012: John B. Gurdon, Shinya Yamanaka
Don't take this as legal advice (it's not), but my personal belief is that money is better spent patenting novel/non-obvious subject matter. Execution is very, very hard; if you waste all of your money on a poorly-executed idea, you're basically out of luck.

While many people on here like to tout the idea that investors invest in teams, there are many more investors who don't trust people that much--they want to invest in something other than charisma. If all your company has is an idea on which you're feverishly working, it's all but worthless in the absence of patent protection.
HBR: How to Speak More Strategically
Any HN readers in Florence, Italy?
Just moved to Florence, Italy, for a job. Any HN readers around?
Somewhat related: Huawei has supported the equipment to build broadband networks in some poorer countries essentially for free. If someone wants details, I can bug a Maroccan friends for reference.
While I can answer some of these questions (and could answer them all a few years ago while attending university) this kind of knowledge is simply not something that I use on a daily basis. I also doubt that many others developers use it unless they have very specialized jobs.

These kind of questions should not be the only basis of the software development final exam. In software development problem solving, communication with others, knowledge of the tools etc. are much more important than knowing random knowledge about algorithms. And these skills are much harder to test than asking the worst-case run time of quicksort.
Well, to be fair, I may have jumped to conclusions by calling it an "explosion". Something disassembled itself for sure, but it may have just been the bell nozzle rather than the whole engine (combustion chamber, turbopump, etc.).

SpaceX is calling it an "unplanned shutdown", but it's unclear at what point the shutdown was commanded. It's possible that some off-nominal parameter triggered an engine shutdown, at which point the sudden vacuum inside the engine bell would have caused the nozzle to collapse. (Note that this happened at Max-Q, the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, so the outside force on the nozzle would have been significant). This would have had some impact on the aerodynamics of the vehicle (with the flight dynamics software compensating perfectly), but it wouldn't really have been a threat to the other engines, and is not too dissimilar from some unplanned shutdowns which the Saturn V experienced. It wouldn't really count as an "explosion". It might just be a (relatively benign) software bug which triggered the shutdown.

On the other hand, the engine might have disassembled itself first, followed by the shutdown order to keep it from dumping uncombusted propellant. This would be an actual explosion of the engine -- contained by the kevlar shielding to keep it from damaging the surrounding engines. If this is the case, then it's a huge validation of SpaceX's RAID-like design philosophy, since I don't believe that any launch vehicle has ever survived such an explosion, much less completed its mission to perfection.
I don't need to know these things in my day-to-day job either. However, if I did need to know them, they'd be a Google search away, and I could find them out in less than a minute (less than the time it takes me to get urllib2 to send cookies, for example).

On the other hand, I imagine that someone who hasn't been formally trained in complexity would have a harder time, because they wouldn't be aware of basic concepts such as complexity, the O notation, etc. Therefore, asking whether someone knows what O(n) means strikes me as a better performance test than trivia like the difference between O(2^n) and O(3^n).
Ok. Here's another article about it where "joke" is used:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/april-jones-man-charged...
"if else chains" is to "switch statement" as "comparisons" is to "hash table" as "quick sort" is to "radix sort"

Too many graduates know worthless stuff. It's terrible most programmers don't know something simple like how a switch statement uses a jump table and is not if-then-elses.

You might add "binary tree" is to "b-tree" in my analogies but that's not true. It's about the fact blocks are 512 bytes and you want minimal block reads.

At Ticketmaster, they did not use SQL. They used raw block accesses. To find an account, they used account number as block number, etc. They used B-TREES and stuff, too, for indexing.

They used RAD51, which is octal for 41 which is A-Z 0-9 and some symbols.
Top Tips: To Get Stuff Done.
Unless BoB was involved, in which case they jacked up their areas and played as part of the corp.
Yes, this is CompSci, not software engineering
GoCardless (YC S11) is hiring front-end engineers in London
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On a day-to-day basis, you will be:

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REQUIREMENTS:

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- A good grounding in both unit & integration testing

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- Active participation in building open source software

- Experience writing cross domain third-party JavaScript applications

- Passion for implementing beautiful, engaging user experiences

- Dedication to unit testing, code review and code quality, both using existing tools and building your own solutions

We have roles for experienced & more junior developers - the salary is extremely competitive and will depend on experience & ability. Stock options will form part of the compensation package.

To apply, email hiroki@gocardless.com
These questions are way too basic- the first 4 can be answered directly from the definition of each term, and there is no thinking involved. The 5th question can be answered with knowledge from 1 lesson in graph theory.
Then perhaps the author shouldn't be presenting them as practical issues, and claim that people who don't know the answers either shouldn't be programmers, or work in some tiny niche. You read the context article he linked to, right?
We were there for two weeks about a week ago. You're living in a lovely city!
How many have you got already?
"Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker EVERY YEAR? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas?"
I wonder what is hidden behind word "free". It is not unknown fact that China is getting oil and other natural resources in exchange of infrastructure in some African countries. In this case it might be special market conditions. I'm guessing only but I really don't believe in generosity of corporations (be it Chinese, US or any other country).
It's easy to dismiss a field when you compare a complicated problem to an easy problem, and then object to a lack of answers for the complicated problem, because there are so much more and better answers for the easy problem.

Let's face it: Physics is easy! It's objects are often cheap to study, and usually doesn't react to the behavior of the observer. Additonally, the observed behavior is often regular and easy to model with maths. There are millions of research grants, and job opportunites because its findings are often economically useful. Also, people in general don't think they 'know' its findings in advance, so it's much easier to overcome your own biases, and opinions. In most cases, there is often no politics involved about the results.

In contrast, the social sciences are really hard. Lots of causes make research harder: Objects often react to the researcher, or the setup. They want to get payed for their time. Sometimes, they react to the experimental setup due a political stance. There are ethical constraints for experiments. The shere variability of human behaviour makes it hard to use mathemathical models to describe theories. Its findings are not as useful economically, because they cannot be impletemented on a large scale. Potential users of the research often think, they 'know' how people react, anyway (folk psychology). For some findings, many people are also motivated to question the results because it conflicts with their political opinion.

Overall, the barriers are much higher for the social sciences to make progress. I think these fields deserver the label 'hard', for finding the truth is really hard here.
From experience, Italy is not the best place for hackers. I had to move out to find a decent job. There might be something in Milan or Rome but other way is really hard. Anyway, buon divertimento!
NASA - SpaceX Launches to the International Space Station
It's not like performance is a fundamental property of the language, it's just a matter of which tools are available. JITs outperforming compilers is just a matter of specialized compilation approach being able to outperform a generalized compilation approach, which is actually a far more fundamental truth than abstractions having a performance penalty. LLVM outperforms GCC in some cases.

However, in general JITs do not outperform GCC. The JIT overhead only pays off in a limited set of cases.

Most people publishing performance benchmarks on the Internet barely know how to compile a C program for production, let alone write or benchmark one. Google did a thorough benchmark of several languages and C++ was the clear winner:
https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-H...
Stumbled upon a HBR aticle from my bookmarks and I wanted to
post it on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626227) for a larger audience:

On firefox, the original HBR article, when viewed with this plugin completely wipes out the page. You may want to check your plugin on that page to see why it messes up your code. :)
Infoworld: Which Freaking PaaS Should I Use
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Salesforce.com, and VMware all have PaaS offerings. There are also smaller vendors such as CloudBees that are compelling. Each vendor has a set of differentiating characteristics beyond the many technical and cosmetic differences. They might even be targeting different sorts of customers. Which one should you choose? To find out, we examined seven PaaS solutions based on the top concerns we hear from customers.
- Highly Driven
- Highly focus
This is the interesting bit

"on each paper, at least four of the five questions relates directly to material I have needed to know during my time working on Tarsnap, "

Most software jobs are far more distant from CS that Colin's. And more power to him for working fulltime on something that leverages his knowledge. (spoken as someone who spent a decade doing glue-random-apis-together-and-bill -by-the-hour enterprise software scut work)
The difference between O(2^n) and O(3^n) isn't trivia; if you can answer the question, then you have an understanding of what big-O means. Asking someone to recite the definition they learned of O(n) is easy; asking someone to think critically about the definition of big-O and how 2^n and 3^n relate shows a deeper understanding. I haven't memorized any trivia relating to these functions, but I convinced myself within a few seconds of the answer from the definition of big-O.
Last time I checked this was Hacker News. One of the commonly accepted meanings of 'hacker' is someone who challenges the existing order and power structures. You won't find many friends here with this attitude.
asking whether someone knows what O(n) means strikes me as a better performance test than trivia like the difference between O(2^n) and O(3^n)

So far that's turning out to be one of the most useful questions, actually... but I wouldn't call it trivia.
I wonder about the utility of an exam that one can ace with five minutes of googling.
I've settled for http://hckrnews.com/ as the HN filtering site -- you can switch between Top 10 / Top 20 and for extreme procrastination, "Top 50%". With a Chrome extensions you can also track # of comments since you last time read them, for the stories with interesting discussions.
"If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why — most likely you're either you're missing something you really should know, or you're lucky enough to be working within a narrow area where your deficit doesn't matter."[1]

I'm a self-taught front end web developer who didn't have a traditional computer science education. I'm looking to move into general software development, and I can't answer any of the questions on the first paper without cheating.

Can anyone recommend specific online courses or books for the four proposed papers[2] to fill the gaps in my knowledge without spending three years at Oxford?

[1]: From the original post at http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-10-08-software-developm...

[2]:

1. Algorithms and Data Structures
2. Computer Architecture and Operating Systems
3. Mathematics
4. Networking and Systems
Appears it has already been on Reddit too:

http://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/113585/man_ch...
My guess is that they didn't waste energy by paying too much attention to blogging coder's rants.
No, you aren't. I tried something like that in the past and it didn't seem to work. No idea why now!
> Yes, they say that, but the study offers no evidentiary support for that opinion.

Have you actually read the study in full? If your claiming that the study does not in fact prove what the abstract says it does, then you'll need to provide some more details on that.
They got lucky - they picked the right career and made the right choice enough times to still enjoy what they do decades later.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks these questions should be easy. Alas, evidence so far is that they aren't.
How To Freaking Deploy On major PaaS offerings
Installation notes/instructions to reproduce the steps we used to deploy the Granny's Addressbook war file on Popular PaaS. Links to source on github, etc.
> Unless they're missing some other factor

From Abstract: "and a comprehensive set of potential 3rd variables were included as covariates in each analysis".

Sounds like they certainly tried to control for that - you'd have to read the full study to see the details.
Great Circle Path – Distance Between Two GEO Coordinates
I guess I'll have to reserve mine for breaking out of security-glass-walled cells.
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it
I'm not going to be handing out degrees based on these. If you mean the utility of the specific questions, the point is that knowing these things is indicative of your general level of knowledge in certain areas.
> I'm trying to understand what exactly they did from everybody else that set them apart.

Because I'm one of the success stories, I'm in a position to answer. A successful programmer is not just a programmer, he is also a personal representative, a salesman and a contract negotiator.

I originally wrote what became Apple Writer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) because I was writing a technical magazine article that was difficult to organize. I finally realized I could use my newly acquired Apple II to organize my disorganized notes and help in editing. So I divided my time between writing the article (about Special Relativity) and programming my Apple II to help with the writing task. This meant I was the first user of my program, and I was a demanding customer, a factor that helped the project along.

Eventually Apple heard about my program (originally called LexiCalc, a name meant to remind people of VisiCalc) and, having far too few programs for their computer, asked to see my program. After a lengthy negotiation in which I demanded and secured a 25% royalty rate, we had a deal.

The bottom line -- Apple Writer didn't become a success only because of my programming skills. It became a success and a household name because I was able to negotiate a royalty marketing deal with Apple that served both our needs. The fact that a 25% royalty rate was excessive, was unknown to either me or Apple at the time of the original negotiation, and by the time we both realized it, I was unwilling to change the terms.

To reiterate, programmers that become successful do it by having skills beyond programming -- they know how to present themselves, they know how to negotiate, and they earn a reputation for reliability.
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A number of places on the Internet are claiming that the joke was:

What's the difference between Mark Bridger and Santa Claus?

I'm not going to repeat the punchline as I'm British and don't want to go to jail. Google is your friend.
Can Chibi(R7RS) be used in real world applications ?, and I am curious do you know when can we expect R7RS large spec to be finish.
IPhone5 or Samsung Galaxy 3? conceptual tools for decision making
Yes, to say the least... I do not know what paved the way for all aforementioned programmers put after reading about Carmacks work in "Masters of Doom" I'd say focus is extremely important... And at least myself is extremely bad at it - there is always 10-ich projects going on... If you want success today I think being extremely specialized is a must.
The PC and internet fuled the productivity gains of the nineties. If you look at the timing, the stock market crashed a couple of months after the ruling came out. Up until that time, the internet was the wild west. With the Microsoft judgment, it became clear to the market that the internet would be subject to regular rules. The stock market plays off such psychological factors. Also, Microsoft was the biggest player back then so it was a blow to the entire industry. People were wondering if the interet boom was a speculative bubble, and the ruling was the pin that popped it.
Japan's New Tech Generation